The Whole World Was Watching — Chicago 1968, Part 1

“The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.”

Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley

Chronicle archives

Chicago police officers battle demonstrators in the streets of Chicago 40 years ago.

As the Democrats are gathered in Denver this week for a historic national convention to nominate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, we’re taking a look back at another historic Democratic National Convention — Chicago 1968.

The Democrats came to Chicago 40 years ago today and Mayor Richard J. Daley had the welcome mat out for them. Thousands of uninvited Yippies, hippies and other assorted anti-war youth came, too. However, instead of a welcome mat, Daley had thousands of police officers on duty to make sure the unwanted visitors toed the line. Daley refused to grant a permit for protesters to march on the International Amphitheater, where the Democrats were gathering, or to allow camping in Lincoln or Grant parks. Because of that, the Chicago police had their hands full trying to maintain law and order.

While the Democrats were holding what the Yippies called “Convention of Death,” the Yippies planned a five-day “Festival of Life” with hopes of drawing 100,000 young people to Chicago. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people answered their call.

The first day of the festival, Sunday, Aug. 25, 1968, was to feature a concert with the MC5 and several other big-name bands in Lincoln Park. Some 5,000 people turned out for a day of music, but soon found out that this concert was going to be no picnic in the park.

Looking back at the event of 40 years ago, MC5 founder and guitarist Wayne Kramer said that when the band arrived to play, everything was in disarray.

“There was no stage. No flatbed truck. We played on the ground with the people. There was no sound system. We brought our own sound system. There were no generators. There were no (portable toilets). . . . We had to get power for the band from a hot-dog vender (with) a long industrial extension cord,” Kramer said by telephone from California last week.

“It was as unorganized as it was possible to be,” he said. “But that was the way we did things.”

For Kramer, it was really more a matter of having the chance to participate. “When the opportunity came to be part a protest against the policies of the Democratic Party relating to the war in Vietnam, that’s what I did.”

Michael James, in 1968 an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society in Chicago’s Uptown area, went to Lincoln Park to hear the music. As a community organizer working in a poor neighborhood, he was opposed to the convention and the demonstrations coming in. “We felt it would screw up our local organizing.”

“People were coming to town; there were certainly a lot of radicals, Yippies and people who were opposed to the whole Democratic Party and process. There were also the Eugene McCarthy kids. . . . We thought we would encourage the McCarthy kids to move to the left of the Democrats,” James said in a telephone interview earlier this summer.

Although the concert was supposed to be a daylong event, only MC5 played and they played only about 40 minutes, Kramer said.

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“We were the only artist to come and play,” Kramer said. Many of their contemporaries, California bands, had agreed to come. However, he said, “They had decided that this was something they were not going to be comfortable participating in.”

“You know, I used to criticize them but I don’t any more. They made the decision that they made and they were right. It was uncomfortable. And it was dangerous,” Kramer said. “But for the MC5, this is what we did all the time. This was nothing new.”

Were they afraid? “We had the fear,” Kramer said. “We just did it anyway.”

From his vantage point facing the crowd, Kramer said, he saw a lot of provocation by people in the crowd, which they later found out through COINTELPRO and through the Freedom of Information Act were Chicago police officers and federal agents trying to provoke violence in the young people.

“I saw numerous occasions where members of the Chicago Police Department would ride their motorcycles through the crowd, provocatively, dangerously, aggressively. So, even though we were all there and it was a rock concert it didn’t feel like a rock concert. It was very tense. You didn’t see a lot of smiling faces,” he said.

“The police were everywhere,” he said. “All over the city, everywhere you turned there were police.” (Chicago had 12,000 police officers on duty; in addition there were some 13,000 Army and National Guard personnel standing by for crowd control.)

“My experience with these kinds of situations led me to expect that when the band stopped playing and the crowd didn’t have something to focus on any longer, that the energy would turn negative and violent. I’d just been in those situations before and that’s what happened. I think that that was kind of the cue.”

“When we stopped playing, the police kind of used that as their opportunity to initiate aggressive, clearing the park action,” Kramer said. ” And, of course, many young people in Chicago were not prepared to go quietly.”

The MC5 were known for their radical politics and their incredibly energetic live shows. I asked how political their performance was that day in the park.

“Our thing was always that the politics were inherent in the art. You can’t separate the art and the politics. Chairman Mao said bad art is bad for the revolution,” Kramer said, laughing. “We were trying to do the best art we could. Our performances were fundamentally rock ‘n’ roll performances.”

“But believe me, (singer) Rob Tyner was a political firebrand. I stood onstage with him many a night and heard him urge the audience into taking action, exhort them into stepping up and becoming involved in the world around them,” Kramer said. “We did that consciously and with a little bit of fun on the side.”

Kramer said they know things were going to start to bad once they finished their performance.

“So as fast as we could, us and the roadies loaded our gear.” Kramer said. “We just loaded everything in our vans and drove across the park and across the median onto the highway to get out of harm’s way.”

Sure enough, Kramer was right. When the music was over, it time for the police to begin their performance. At the 11 p.m. park curfew, James said, “Here came the police with tear-gas masks on. They let off the tear gas and basically forced thousands of people out of the park into the streets surrounding the park in an area called Old Town.”

James, who since 1976 has owned the Heartland Café in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, said he remembers being chased by the police. “I’m sure people were throwing rocks,” he said. His last memory of the day was hiding from the police in a stairwell.

And so ended the first day of the Festival of Life.

(This YouTube clip shows the MC5 at their energetic best. Warning: Kick Out the Jams begins with a vulgarity. But then it turns into full-speed-ahead rock ‘n’ roll.)

Kramer founded The MC5 in 1964 in Detroit, when he was 15 years old. He’s recognized now as rock and roll’s political pioneer.

“I was part of a movement to stop a war then, and I’m part of a movement to stop a war now,” he said. “In that very special case, it was our youthful defiance that ruled the day.”

Following are highlights of our conversation last week:

40 Years After: How did your band evolve into being the musical background for the revolution?

Wayne Kramer: At what point do you go from just wanting to be a guitar player in a band to seeing things in a larger vision? I think that it came as a result of living in a time where there was agreement amongst all young people that the nation was going in the wrong direction. I personally became radicalized by the events that unfolded in my life. In confrontations that I had with the authorities that were not justified. In observing how America treated black Americans wasn’t justified. How America treated Vietnamese wasn’t justified. Even things like the marijuana laws, where people were getting outrageous prison sentences for smoking weed weren’t justified. It wasn’t right. And to me, it came out of a sense of patriotism. If you’re conscious at all of what this American experiment is supposed to represent, that the people have a voice in the direction, it’s we the people. It seemed to me that big government and kind of a Machiavellian political class were pushing the country to ruin.

Courtesy of Muscletone Records

Wayne Kramer today writes music for television and movies and continues to make rock ‘n’ roll records and perform live.

I just started off wanting to be a professional musician and make my living playing music. All of a sudden I was part of something that was bigger just me. It was a whole generation and I found that I could connect being an artist and observer with being an activist. And to not do so was to abdicate my responsibility as a citizen of the world.

I was on the left of the left. And I was a radical progressive trying to change America but up from the heart of America. There were no outside agitators. I’m an inside agitator. I was born in Detroit, you know.

FYA: Is the fire you had 40 years ago still burning?

WK: I don’t think . . . once you acquire an appreciation and a fascination for how things become the way they are, I don’t think you ever lose that. If you call it a political consciousness . . . I don’t think you ever lose that. I certainly haven’t. I’m as committed to social justice today as I ever was and take as much action as I possible can today, more than I ever was. I think you have to look at this in a longer time frame.

The ongoing struggle to transcend our base nature is a matter of you struggle and lose, struggle and lose, struggle and lose, then you win one. And you go back and struggle and lose. So, the focus in on the struggle, on the effort.

We know the results are going to come slowly. But listen they do come, you know. My generation kind of gets short shrift as restless youth, but we did stop the war in Vietnam. Nixon and Spiro Agnew were driven from office. The draft was ended. The war powers act was passed. A curb on the imperial presidency. The Democratic Party was radically reformed. The environment entered the national consciousness. Earth Day arose from the ’60s. After 25 years, 18-year-olds were able to vote. Black studies, Latino studies, all these things were integrated into the schools. There were a lot of commissions. Real change happened in this country. And I think real change can continue to happen. In fact, it’s inevitable that real change will happen.

FYA: Has the Bush administration has set the country back?

WK: To say that the Bush administration has set the country back would be an understatement of a magnitude. (laughing) It’s beyond understanding. What he’s done, you know, he’s at least by my understanding of the Geneva Conventions a war criminal. Pre-emptive war and torture are two violations of the Geneva Conventions. I think he is strengthened the imperial presidency. He has damaged and endangered Americans at home and abroad. I think he has absolutely driven the economy into a hole that will take decades to dig out of. I think he’s profoundly misdirected and surrounded himself with men who are even more criminal in their intent and their actions.

FYA: Do you think there will be extreme pressure on the next president to get back to where we need to be again?

WK: It only happens from the ground up. Barack Obama represents a fresh voice. The cast of his mind is that of a thinking man, which we haven’t had as a leader of this country since Jimmy Carter. He is a thinking man. Bill Clinton was a thinking man, but I think Barack is a cut above and beyond every professional politician that I’ve seen. But Barack can’t change everything in this county, and social justice has to come from the ground up. And it comes down to: Is it that important that, you know, people drive SUVs. In America it’s like I want what I want when I want it. There’s no sense of sacrifice. The World Trade Center gets destroyed and Bush’s sense of sacrifice is go shopping. It’s perverse.

FYA: Playing with Rage Against the Machine in Denver, what’s it’s going to be like?

WK: It’s hard to say. (laughing).

FYA: Obviously, you’re not going into it with the fear you had in 68. Are you as political now on stage as you were?

WK: I’m still Wayne Kramer. (laughter, then turning serious) I’ve got a chance to say something, I’ve got a chance to entertain some people, I’ve got a chance to play some music, sing some songs and carry a message. I’m going to try to reinforce some things that I think are important. And if I’ve got to be a burr in the saddle to things that I think need to be irritated, then I’m ready to do that, too.

odd that years after my left-of-left involvement, i came to find the MC5 – a band whose ferocity i equate with a riot. and while white panther politics add to the mystique of their history…it’s their sound that made me pledge allegiance to rock and roll.